Grow Wild Scotland Spring/Summer update

While the frost melted I took the opportunity spread the Grow Wild word at events including Scottish Environment Week celebrations at Parliament in February, where I partnered with Big Lunch.

It was also a joy to bring everyone back together for the next chapter of our flagship Water Works in Barrhead. In April, members of the community gathered to celebrate their hard work and achievement at Barrhead’s new Foundry centre. These friendly folk are mapping out activities on the site, community days and making sure the natural wild space is accessible to all. Thank you to Barrhead High School, Young Enterprise Scotland (YES), Richmond Fellowship Trust, Barrhead Centre, Men’s Shed, East Renfrewshire Council and greenspace scotland who are all making it happen. Watch this space for updates!

With Glasgow celebrating Green Year, Grow Wild community groups came together to share project ideas and to find out more about Scottish native flowers and plants. Expert horticulturalist and botanist, Andrew Sinclair of Glasgow Botanic Gardens presented initial survey results and planting plans from our flagship site in Barrhead.

I’ve also been tending to our new crop of community projects, which you can check out in detail over on growwilduk.com. They include an amazing endeavour by Dunain Community Woodland to create a natural Fasgadh (shelter) along the Great Glen Way. They kicked off their Grow Wild project with open fire pancake-making, a community clearance event in March to coincide with Great Gorse Day, an impromptu cycle drop-in from Visit Scotland and a photo shoot with Inverness press.

Meanwhile in Huntly, Aberdeenshire contemporary arts organisation Deveron Arts are getting stuck into creating their land art project Oaks and Amity. The aim is create an inspiring place of reflection in Bin Forest using oaks, a historical symbol of peace alongside native white wild flowers such as giant white foxgloves, snowdrops and lily of the valley.

With over 50 funded Grow Wild spaces including youth, community and flagship projects you can imagine I’ve got a whole load of whizzing around Scotland planned for the summer! I can’t wait.

And finally, thanks to all of you Scotland Grow Wilders have been sharing your sowing activities and seed kit activities on Twitter and helped me up my followers to a mammoth one thousand – I’m also looking forward to your blooming success in the warmer months.

If you’re interested in one of the projects I’ve talked about or you’d like to share your own Grow Wild photos and stories you can email me at [email protected] or follow me on Twitter @GrowWildScot.